mindbut Augustine had been in no mood to listen to one of Harper’s lectures. Nor was he now, for that matter. A brilliant man, Maxwell, but you could not interact with him on an emotional level; he thought only in terms of facts and figures, causes and effects, and dry intellectual syllogisms. It was exactly for that reason that Augustine could never tell him about the Briggs decision. Harper would be appalled by it because he would be unable to see past the act itself, would be incapable of understanding the emotions which had precipitated it.
Augustine said, “What is it, Maxwell?”
“I’d like a few minutes of your time,” Harper answered in his dry precise voice.
“Everyone wants a few minutes of my time. Can’t it wait?”
Harper frowned slightly. “I suppose it can, but-” “Good. Come see me in thirty minutes or so. After we’ve gotten underway.”
Augustine pivoted away from him, not giving him the opportunity to argue, and entered the office compartment. Facing inside, he drew the door shut behind him. When he heard Harper’s steps retreating in the corridor he crossed to his desk and sank into the wide leather chair behind it.
The office was cool and dark: the Presidential Special was air conditioned, and the shades were already drawn across the windows. He sat quietly for a time, looking at the mahogany-paneled walls with their colorful display of railroad timetables and handbills and chromolithograph posters, the tufted red-velvet settee which had originally graced a Pullman drawing room on the old Erie Railroad in the 1880s, the hand-crafted bar cabinet from the Central Pacific car that had once belonged to Leland Stanford, the six-foot mahogany conference table with its satin-damask-upholstered chairs. God, it’s good to be back here, he thought, and smiled to himself, and felt again the stir of excitement. There was something about trains that got into a man’s blood, filled him with a sense of joy and adventure, sharpened his awareness of externals and of himself. And as he had many times before, he felt a fleeting wistful sadness that he had not ignored his father’s wishes and had gone into railroading instead of politics. If he had gone into railroading, who was to say that he would not be a happier and more fulfilled man than he was today?
He began to hum “John Henry,” and as soon as he did that he had a vivid mental image of a huge black man swinging a ten-pound sheep-nose hammer in the heat and the smoky darkness of a mountain tunnel in West Virginia, the Big Bend tunnel on the C amp;O road more than a century ago. John Henry, driving drills into bare rock to make holes for the blasting charges, risking death from silicosis and suffocation and falling rock and cave-ins, finally dying not from any of these but from sheer exhaustion in an impossible confrontation with a steam drill. John Henry, steel-driving man.
When John Henry was a little baby,
Sittin’ on his daddy’s knee,
Point his finger at a little piece of steel,
Say, “Hammer’s gonna be the death of me,
Lawd, Lawd,” say, “Hammer’s gonna be the death of me.”
Augustine sang a second verse, and in the middle of a third the Presidential Special’s air horn sounded to announce departure-sounded loud and harsh and toneless, nothing like those grand old whistles of yore. Humming again, he stood and went to the bar cabinet. He had wanted a drink badly last night, after Justice had first left the Oval Study, but he had restrained himself; the worst time to reach for alcohol was when you were in the middle of a crisis. But a drink or two now would not hurt. In fact, they were called for: a toast to railroading and to the memory of steel-driving men like John Henry.
While he was making himself a bourbon-and-soda, the train started to move-slowly, smoothly, the iron wheels creating small rhythmic sounds on the rails. Augustine raised his glass, drank from it, and then returned to his chair and lifted the shade on the nearest window. Outside, the network of tracks and strings of out-of-service cars slid by, shining in the hard glare of the sun; then they were gone and in their place were buildings and palm trees and the distant bluish shadows of hills and mountains.
He smiled again and sang:
O the cap’n he told John Henry,
“I believe this mountain’s sinkin’ in”;
John Henry he say to his cap’n, “O my,
It’s my hammer just a-hossin’ in the wind,
Lawd, Lawd, it’s my hammer just a-hossin’ in the wind.”
The train picked up speed and the air horn echoed again, and Augustine experienced a familiar illusion of motionlessness, as if the Presidential Special were standing still and the world itself were rushing by. There was a curious sense of peace in that. He could imagine, at least for a while, that he had been relieved of the pressures of office, that the complexities of human society were under the influence of God alone.
He filled a pipe, settled back with it and with his drink. I wish I’d known you, John Henry, he thought. I think we’d have gotten along. Yes, by God, I think we’d have gotten along just fine.
Two
Now, here on the train as it moves away from Union Station, an understanding comes to us: the execution of Briggs was our first act of mercy, but it must not be our last.
He was only part of the conspiracy, perhaps its leader but more probably, in retrospect, its point man. There are still others involved, in any case, and before the plot can be effectively neutralized these others, too, must be eliminated. You cannot nullify a cancer by killing one of its cells; you must kill them all, every last one.
But who are they? We are not quite sure yet; we can make educated guesses, but guesses are not enough- we must be absolutely certain. Peter Kineen is a major part of the conspiracy, of course; the President, however, recognizes him as an enemy, and he is not nearly so dangerous as those close to Augustine, such as Briggs, who are seeking to undermine and destroy him from within. Kineen must die, yes, but the others, the ones still hidden, must die first.
We will be even more vigilant and cunning from now on. And when we become sure of each of the remaining traitors, we will strike as we struck with Briggs. Swiftly, vengefully, and in the name of righteousness.
Oh yes, oh yes, our acts of mercy have only just begun.
Three
Harper made his way awkwardly along the swaying corridors from the club car toward the aides’ Pullman. Trains, he thought with distaste. Great lumbering anachronisms totally devoid of dignity, with no effective function in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Lower-class conveyances like buses and streetcars. Playthings for men such as Augustine who had never quite outgrown the toys and fascinations of childhood. All in all, a preposterous mode of transportation for the President of the United States, and for a man like himself whose sensibilities were offended by their superfluous nature.
The motion of the train had given him a sour stomach, and the glass of plain soda he had consumed in the club car made him belch again, delicately. He had spent fifteen minutes in the club car, brooding at one of the tables and watching flickers of sunlight play stroboscopically on its surface, but then restlessness had brought him to his feet and sent him out of there, just as it had brought him into the car in the first place.
Why had Augustine moved up the date of their departure for The Hollows from the weekend to today? Was it because of the media reaction to his ill-timed joke about the Vice-President’s problems in the West? Because of the Indian crisis and his inability to cope with it? Or had something else happened, something of which Harper had not yet been made aware? The suddenness of this change in plans-Harper had learned about it only this morning, when he arrived at the White House-carried suspicious overtones. As did Augustine’s refusal to talk to him in Washington and on the plane. As did the President’s haggard, moody aspect. As did the First Lady’s uncharacteristic reticence today, the bluish lines of fatigue under her eyes that she had not quite been able to conceal with makeup.
There were more people in the corridors now-stewards (none of whom were black: a kind of reverse racism,
